This has been going on long enough. Let’s bring it to an end and find the people responsible.

Five reporters must reveal their government sources for stories they wrote about Steven J. Hatfill and investigators’ suspicions that the former Army scientist was behind the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001, a federal judge ruled yesterday.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton is yet another blow to the news industry as it seeks to shield anonymous sources who provide critical information — especially on the secret inner workings of government.

“The names of the sources are central to Dr. Hatfill’s case,” Walton wrote in a 31-page opinion.

The ruling is a victory for Hatfill, a bioterrorism expert who has argued in a civil suit that the government violated his privacy rights and ruined his chances at a job by unfairly leaking information about the probe. He has not been charged in the attacks that killed five people and sickened 17 others, and he has denied wrongdoing.

Hatfill’s suit, filed in 2003, accuses the government of waging a “coordinated smear campaign.” To succeed, Hatfill and his attorneys have been seeking the identities of FBI and Justice Department officials who disclosed disparaging information about him to the media.

In lengthy depositions in the case, reporters have identified 100 instances when Justice or FBI sources provided them with information about the investigation of Hatfill and the techniques used to probe his possible role in anthrax-laced mailings. But the reporters have refused to name the individuals.

The decision means that five journalists — Allan Lengel of the Washington Post; Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, both of Newsweek; Toni Locy, formerly of USA Today; and James Stewart of CBS News — are under instruction from the court to answer specific questions about who provided them with information about the investigation’s focus on Hatfill.

Story

The less famous cousin of “Anonymous Sources”, named “Anonymous Officials” and another one named “Anonymous Senior Official” have told the New York Times there is an “ongoing discussion” in the White House as to strategy to stop more Republican senators from defecting from their support for the war in Iraq.

According to the “Anonymous” family, the discussion centers around when the president should announce a pullback of forces in the dangerous Baghdad area as part of the surge.

White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush’s Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Mr. Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and other cities.

Mr. Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin those discussions until after Sept. 15, when the top field commander and the new American ambassador to Baghdad are scheduled to report on the effectiveness of the troop increase that the president announced in January. But suddenly, some of Mr. Bush’s aides acknowledge, it appears that forces are combining against him just as the Senate prepares this week to begin what promises to be a contentious debate on the war’s future and financing.

Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bush’s strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

I don’t know what the thinking is in high government and it gives me a headache just imagining what stress everyone has on him/her trying to figure out how to accomplish what they want to accomplish while knowing Congress is breathing down their necks for a withdrawal date.

I am not doubting the truthfulness of this story, but I just get tired of people in high places running their mouths off to newspaper reporters, but don’t want their names attached to the report. Such is life in Washington DC.

We’ll see what we’ll see.